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interview with C. Enrique Ortiz
Two weeks ago, we spoke with Liselott Brunnberg, who has been researching the impact of context on mobile design. Now we talk with C. Enrique Ortiz, Founder and CTO of eZee, who has been working on context from the technical and platform sides.
Barbara Ballard: What excites you about mobile?
C. Enrique Ortiz: Back in 1997 I was working with embedded systems, but when I first saw mobile and wireless technologies, people carrying handsets – carrying little computers everywhere – I knew it was the future of computing. It excited me that you could have personal computers you could take everywhere, that you could use them for communications and access to the internet.
I realized that personalizing the experience was important. Even though I'm not a designer like you, Barbara, I spent a lot of time studying the user experience on a mobile handset and how to deliver it. I for one believe this is the era of mobility, and that context will be king, much like content was supposed to be king on the internet. If you go to our website, you'll see that all over. Our product delivers such high degree of personalization and relevance to the handset; it??s good that we are finally delivering this, something that we've been talking about this for years. I will touch on this when we get to the conference, when I get a few minutes.
BB: It sounds like you are a founder of a company trying to do all of this.
CEO: The company is called eZee, and delivering this experience is hard. It takes many moving pieces.
For a very long time, we as an industry have been focusing on the ???micro??? aspects of mobility &ndash the device and its capabilities, web vs. other technologies, APIs, and so on; lots of low-level details. But delivering the right experience is much more than that. That's what we are delivering at eZee. To truly deliver on a contextually relevant experience for the consumer, many elements must come together in real time; and we have a 3-level approach to this problem. This requires a complex and sophisticated platform. I personally have been putting the pieces required to do this since 1997 and the culmination is something we call 3D Mobile. It is the integration of data, domain expertise and demand management and we believe it will touch nearly every component of the global economy. That??s what we are delivering at eZee.
BB: So the work you are doing at eZee helping you realize the vision you had in 1997?
CEO: Yes, exactly. We started in the mobile payments space, and it amazes me where we ended up; in exactly the area I??ve been preaching for a long time; that is a testament of what mobility is about; about complementing the Web and delivering the needed information, no more, no less, all depending on the user??s situation, interactions and context – and for that, it is about understanding the mobile user.
With eZee, and with the help of my team, I??m not just realizing the vision, but I continue to learn; research and explore the space, and deliver. It is a lot of fun.
BB: Do you have a recommendation for people who don't yet have the eZee platform to improve contextuality?
CEO: You can write some of the server side components, or even do it client side. There are a lot conversations about mobile web versus local clients and even messaging, but each approach is good for the right problems. If we want to use mobile context, we can't really use the mobile web as it stands today. That means that you have to do some level of context awareness by asking for ZIP codes, or the new Google location APIs, to learn part of the context of the user and apply it in your application.
Elements of the mobile context
If you want to really leverage the user's mobile context to its fullest, you have to use the capabilities of the handset. Right now that means a local client. In the future this can be mobile web, or even a hybrid web runtime approach.
BB: You probably have a story about the major use case with your work at the company. What is that story?
CEO: I think one of the key insights we have learned over the last few years is that businesses will be a major factor driving the need for relevant context. Let me take a moment to explain. Helping consumers find things or learn about specific things as they interact, with the physical world, or via the web – location based services and the like – will have a big role in developing the extended mobile experience for the consumer. But we believe the real impact of mobility will be in helping consumers get real savings and/or information, and creating unprecedented supply chain efficiencies, all available at their fingertips, all triggered by a simple interactions using their personal mobile handset.
And at the center of this are the user interactions, the physical-world interactions, the consumer and the business factors, and more importantly, putting it all this together and making sense out all of all it.
Not many companies are talking about this right now, but we believe this is where the industry is headed. If I am at Sony and I can look at my supply chain information and realize that have too much of product X at my Austin warehouse, I can use mobility to influence consumers on the web, and in stores, and really anywhere, in that area. By doing so, Sony benefits by alleviating an expensive inventory management problem and the consumer benefits from aggressive pricing or other aggressive incentives. Win-win.
Sources of physical world interaction
Recently you may have heard Amazon offer to have consumers?? text in a product name or ID number and Amazon will tell them what they can sell the product to them if they can wait to have it shipped. This is very interesting as Amazon is aggressively trying to disaggregate retail outlets. However, what is to stop Sony or any other manufacturer from disaggregating both? Customers of eZee??s Prime platform can be in that position hours after signing on to our service.
BB: Sitting at an intersection, thinking of lunch. Is anybody nearby having a sale?
CEO: Our customers are businesses. Most companies are really going after consumers, in social networking and photos, and so forth. Our customers will develop the scenarios and the one that you described is certainly one. As a matter of fact, our largest and most active sale to date is with Moe??s Southwestern Grill.
BB: What is design?
CEO: Design is the phase in the development of something such as software, the creative phase of that longer cycle or project, when you to create and define the approaches to a specific problem. Through design, you define, decide and organize the elements of and the corresponding relationships for your solution, for the purpose of solving a specific problem. Design requires domain expertise to understand the issues to address and solutions to put together.
BB: So many people in design, development, and business have different understandings of design.
CEO: It's about figuring out how to solve the problem. We are a startup, so we do design, development, and research ourselves.
When I was younger, I was focused on scientifically complete software. Now I know the better solution is to work on getting enough completed and working well to go to market. We work in a very iterative manner, with quick design and development cycles. You certainly can't do that for truly mission-critical software like space shuttle, but for business software you can do it.
In the shuttle software, even comments in the code have to go through a review and testing proces. One time somebody put in a comment that accidentally told the compiler to execute something; it would have been a disaster if that had flown.
BB: Who, other than eZee, is doing context well in mobile right now?
CEO: I guess Google is doing well in some ways and lots of potential. Who else? There are a number of mobile marketing players doing well in different ways. They're figuring out this approach. By name, none are using a similar approach.
BB: What do you think about locative media projects like 230 Miles of Love? Is that context?
CEO: Yes. It's about the circumstances that surround a person at a certain point in time. It could include location, what is around, many things. Anything that uses some piece of the context is using context. You can find some of my writing on the topic on my website.
You can use one piece or ten pieces of it, depending on what is available or what is needed for your product or content to work welll.
Check back periodically for the rest of our interview series with the speakers of Design for Mobile 2008.
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